the area, and there the assistants lifted up a large and heavy
pole, which they poised in the air, and then set the lower end of it in
a sort of socket which was made in an apron which the man wore, which
socket was fastened securely to the man's hips and shoulders by strong
straps, so that he could sustain the weight of the pole by means of
them. The pole was about thirty feet high, and the top was branched like
a pitchfork. It was shaped, in fact, exactly like a pitchfork, except
that there was a bar across from the top of one branch to the top of the
other, and a rope hanging down from the middle of the bar half way down
to the place of bifurcation--that is, to the place where the straight
part of the pole ended and the branches began. Things being thus
arranged, a boy, who was about twelve years old, apparently, came out,
and, leaping up upon the man's shoulders, began to climb up the pole.
When he reached the top of it he took hold of the rope, and by means of
the rope climbed up to the bar. Here he began to perform a great variety
of the most astonishing evolutions, the man all the time poising the
pole in the air. The boy would climb about the bar in every way, drawing
himself up sometimes backwards and sometimes forward, and swinging to
and fro, and turning over and over in every conceivable position. He
would hang to the bar sometimes by his hands and sometimes by his
legs--sometimes with his head downward, sometimes with his feet
downward. He would whirl round and round over the bar a great many
times, till Rollo and Jane were tired of seeing him, and then he would
rest by hanging to the pole by the back_ of his head_, without touching
the bar with any other part of his body. All this time the man who held
the pole kept it carefully poised, moving to and fro about the area
continually in following the oscillations.

[Illustration: THE HIPPODROME.]

The other performance was in some respects more extraordinary still.
There was a mast set up in the ground, thirty or forty feet high. At the
ground, ten feet from the foot of the mast, there commenced an inclined
plane, formed of a plank about a foot or eighteen inches wide, which
ascended in a spiral direction round and round the mast till it reached
the top. A man ascended this plane by means of a large ball, about two
feet in diameter, which he rolled up standing upon it, and rolling it by
stepping continually on the ascending side. There was no ledge or guard